Step One
by rockpaperscissor
Summary: Erik is alone. And then he's not. Starts before first class.
1. Chapter 1

Author's note: I may be a total nerd (geek? *insert correct terminology*) but I thought this movie was fantastic. Everything Magneto resonated so much with me, and Charles Xavier was done masterfully - I never even liked that character before (though Patrick Stewart was pretty good), but James McAvoy did an amazing job. Of course the end just about broke my heart and I'm imagining five different AUs as we speak, but what can you do. Actually, if anyone knows of any particularly good story with these two (preferably epic and preferably not slash, but I'll take what I can get), can you please let me know? I'll be forever grateful!

As for this, I am planning on making it a two-shot, depending on how long it'll take for the next chapter to be written. In the meantime, please read. I hope you'll approve.

* * *

**Step One**

_I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel_

* * *

An exercise in tragedy:

Imagine, for a moment, your parents disappearing in front of your eyes. It is, if unfair and cruel, a somewhat natural progression. You are hardly alone in your pain.

But add to that a sister, a brother. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Add to that your friends, your neighbors, their neighbors, the tailor and the blacksmith and the butcher and the rabbi. Add to that your teacher, your principal, the beggar who always smiled with crooked teeth and the girl who always gave him money. Remember that each of them has family and acquaintances, and recall them in their entirety, just as they were when you saw them - the husband, the wife, the elderly aunt, the doddering infant. Leave no one behind.

Now march them in a line, all of them, everyone you ever knew, and shave their heads bald. Turn their faces drawn and pale, see their arms and legs become nothing more than bone wrapped in skin. Take off their clothes, the opulent and tattered alike. Grant each one a number in their arm, a tally like cattle because they are not like the others, they are no longer people, and instead of millions suffering they are as one animal in pain.

Mark them in your mind, and let them perish, whether by fire or starvation, disease or poisonous smoke. Be creative. Let them each see the worthless death of another, the young before the old, the loud before the weak, the cheerful before the desperate. Turn them against each other, against themselves. Against their God. And be generous. Give one a bullet hole, another a broken neck. Bury each one in an unmarked grave, or in a mass grave - let them dig it first, of course - or save the effort, and leave them where they fall. Set them on fire too, if you'd like. It hardly matters once they're dead.

Then stand there over the nameless ash, the abused wreckage of human bodies. Listen closely to the silent prayers, the deadened screams. Watch the smoke curl and dance into the air.

And ask yourself -

Why are you still here?

* * *

"Drei," Schmidt says, and his mother drops. She's a short woman, it barely takes an instant - Erik doesn't have even have a chance to turn around in time, doesn't get to see the light flicker off in her eyes quickly, decidedly, like the trigger of a gun. There's never enough time to say goodbye to a parent, but Erik Lehnsherr and his mother don't have enough time to even say the words, useless as they'd be. She falls so fast.

She falls so damn fast.

_Everything's all right. __Everything's all right -  
_

In Erik's dreams, she falls forever.

00000

When the war is over, Erik finds himself in northern France. He lives his life from forest to forest, gutter to gutter; stealing an apple here, a loaf of bread there, even once (by happy, happy accident) an entire pot of soup. The pot is heavy - Erik hobbles with it, his arms straining from the weight, and the soup sloshes between his legs as he sprints, spilling bits of carrot and potatoes over the sides.

He doesn't care.

Food has never been so plentiful.

00000

He steals aboard a cargo ship headed for England. It isn't difficult, really, he's become accustomed to being invisible, to exist only in shadows. Perhaps too accustomed - he wakes up in a crate to the sound of a horn blowing, a feeling of dread crawling up his stomach as he realizes they'd already docked and left port. But his feet don't make a sound as he runs along the deck, he doesn't cry out when his bare feet stumble over a jutting nail, and he holds his breath and dives just before the light-studded coast again disappears. The fall feels like eternity; someone shouts behind him as he hits water, but whether it is in anger or concern there's no way to tell. A heavy, muffled silence surrounds him now, the yell is cut off and lost.

_Anger_, he thinks vaguely hours later, and coughs up dirty water onto the wooden floorboards.

00000

For all its poverty - the dirty alleys, the begging veterans, the distinct and all-too-common stench of something rotting - London gives Erik his first glimpse of extravagance. He's never seen so many shops and people and bars, so many _(useless)_ things to buy and refuse, and the first time he sees a car on the road, Erik stops mid-stride and simply _stares._

He's seen cars before, of course. Back in the ghetto you could always see the Nazis make their rounds in armored jeeps, and every so often Erik and his friends would sneak away to the roofs in order to catch a glimpse of tanks in the distance. Shaw had one too - a car, not a tank - but it was nothing like Erik's ever seen, white and sleek and curvy instead of khaki with sharp edges. Erik used to dream of crumpling that hated thing with Shaw inside it, but when Shaw disappeared so did the car.

But London is different. Here there's no quiet rumble of wheels and scattering of stones on pavement, framed by scared murmurs and sharp rapports and the screams of the dead; the silence is instead filled with loud curses and insistent honking and the frivolous revving of engines. Here there's always more than one car on the road, and when they're not sitting in traffic, the drivers barely seem to look where they're going, let alone mark whether people (_Juds) _are where they're supposed to be. It's different here - no one's supposed to _be_ anywhere, as long wherever they turn out to be is legal, of course, and not someone else's property.

At first Erik is sure that whoever owns a car must be royalty, or at the very least involved in the military. That makes sense to him - after all, that is what he knows. But one day, several weeks after he almost drowns swimming the English Channel at night, he is walking up the street, and hears laughter.

It hasn't been quite that long since the war; sounds of mirth and joy sound strange when not following a gunshot. He turns.

The make of the car, Erik will never discover - in his memory it will simply remain as a blurry streak of pale blue, gleaming in the light even though really the day was cloudy _(it always is in London)_ and there was no sun in sight. The driver is a young man driving haphazardly, his clothes starched and ironed by a caring hand, his one arm out the window while he has barely a finger on the wheel. Erik can't help thinking that he's just the right build for factory work. Crammed into the car with him are five others, three girls and two boys, all somewhat younger with careless white faces, and despite the years and the miles he thinks to himself with the judging eye of a Jew from Auschwitz,_ they'd never last._

He hates himself instantly for the thought.

The boys whoop as they stand precariously on the backseat of the car, the girls shriek with giddy fright and attempt to pull them back down, and Erik doesn't understand why they look so foreign, so wrong, until he suddenly realizes that this is what it is to not be afraid.

It is such a different world than the one he knows. For these... these _children - _for they are just that, children - there is no fear but the one before exhilaration, and tempting fate is an adventure, not a daily routine.

Somehow, despite the shadows he follows (_that follow him) _Erik catches the eye of one of the girls. Her face will forever stay clear in his memory - the merry freckles, the too-wide smile, the twinkle of mischief in brown (_or are they hazel?_) eyes... and the way it all seemed to vanish, the girl's grin slowly disappearing into a pale and silent frown. She stares at him as if she can see where he came from, who he is, as if she sees his mother dying before him and the ghetto gates crumple under a power he didn't even know he had.

It's only a moment, brief and transitory, and soon enough one girl elbows her side and one boy tousles her hair - she yelps and swats at him fiercely with a dainty, milky white hand that has never dug a grave.

Erik stares, chest aching empty, and for the first time in forever, he feels unforgivably sixteen. He looks at everything he doesn't have, will never have, and becomes horribly aware of his tattered rags, his overgrown feet; the thick layers of dirt and grime that envelops every inch of his skin, the pronounced dark circles under his eyes from too many nightmares and too little sleep (_he has little enough to steal, but then he'd hardly be the first one to have his throat slit for sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time_). He looks at her and can't remember the last time he laughed, the last time he took a risk because it was fun and not because he had nothing to lose.

His mind takes him back to before the war, to his friends in the ghetto (_their names already escape him)_, the cramped little room his family shared with two other families _(who?)_. The little moments, the ones that are the most important, have already begun to leave him. He can't remember what it was like before, what _he _was like before.

The car sputters out of sight all too soon. He stands there, frozen, Schmidt's coin burning in his pocket.

The anger is always, always there, but it's only in England that Erik begins to grasp what it costs him.

00000

Later, he thinks that if only he'd been angry enough, he could have forced that car still, could have talked to the girl and tried to find out why she could see right through him even though she knows how to laugh like he never did.

There was anger even so, of course - anger at the unfairness of it all, everything that he will never have and everything only other people can afford to be. But the emotion that accompanies that memory is not anger.

It is nostalgia, it is regret.

It is shame.

00000

He came to England to escape the war, what remnants of it are left. He doesn't remember the name of the small town in Germany he and his parents had called home, and wouldn't have come back even if he did. He doesn't keep the Sabbath or the three high holidays, and doesn't enter a single synagogue. He doesn't want to see other survivors, afraid that the horrors haunting their eyes will reflect the horrors haunting his.

He hides the numbers on his arm, and never, _ever_ takes a train.

00000

The first car Erik steals is blue. It doesn't mean anything.

It crashes very well.

00000

_Again, Schmidt says, matter-of-fact, and even though Erik's lifted a bike, once, even though he can do much more than this, really, he feels his eyes water as the coin stays exactly where it is. _

_The man sighs - I don't have another mother for you to kill, Erik, so your cooperation will be appreciated very much, in fact - and he makes a gesture to the side, and suddenly she's there, smiling as she's crying and lighting Shabbas candles and getting shot with a gun and disappearing because she was never there, she was never there, she's dead and Schmidt killed her.  
_

_How about someone else then, Schmidt says, and there are lines of people he doesn't know, lines that stretch out to eternity. _

_He turns to Schmidt, horrified, but Schmidt isn't really there, either, because Schmidt is gone and Erik hasn't even tried to find him, and instead the man with the coin and the glasses and the well-made suit is wearing Erik's face, just like all those people are wearing his mother's._

_Again, that Erik says expressionlessly, and there's a shot._

00000

Years pass. He keeps to himself, and speaks only enough to get by at the odd job he has here and there. His English is good; his French, better. He has few acquaintances, and learns to pave his way through the masses by sheer form and bluster - he is invisible, not inconsequential.

He leaves England - it is far too easy there. He has gotten fat and soft, eating every day, and too many people look at him with pity, as though he is a poor orphan in need of help when he is a grown man in need of a murder. That help is becoming harder and harder to turn down, however, and he _must _turn it down. He has to get stronger.

It is past time to start hunting down his mother's killer, his creator.

His Dr. Frankenstein.

00000

Erik hates Russia, but it does have excellent weapons.

00000

It's been long enough since the war, he decides, and on a whim, he finds himself in Israel. It is a struggling but flourishing country, full of his people, and despite the constant danger they continue to laugh and shout and curse as if they can never be silenced, when the past has proven otherwise far too many times. Some distant part of Erik's mind finds it fascinating, glorious that despite everything, some embers still burn brightly. _(Another one wonders, how can they forget?)_

The rest of him focuses on learning what he can from Mossad.

00000

Sometimes Erik thinks that Israel is a land of journalists; there are so many newspapers, in so many languages, and it would be tedious except it really is an excellent method of practicing his Russian, his English, his French. He only reads the first page, usually - he has better things to do, and it is enough for him to know whether there is or isn't another war.

But one Saturday - Shabbas, his mother had called it, but here it is Shabbat - Erik sits at a cafe by the beach in Tel Aviv, unfolds a French newspaper, and allows himself for once to relax.

Soon enough, his fingers clench onto the paper as if of their own volition. He sits up rigidly, feels his face numb and stiffen.

Because there are... there are _pages_. Pages upon pages upon _pages _of _have you seen Isak Mendlesohn? _and _Looking for Anne Gershkoff from Debika who was in Treblinka _and _I am the mother of Breta and Shmuel Frenkel, please tell me about my children _- and it goes on and on, survivors reaching out to survivors, family to family, lover to lover. Each one hoping against hope, against desperation, trying their hardest to fight the horrible reality that they are all that remain.

That they are alone.

He stares at the ads blindly, throat tightening. The sound of the Mediterranean breaking onto the shore drowns out all other noise.

...Erik has watched everyone he loved die in front of his eyes.

There is no one to hope for.

00000

In Spain, Erik kills a man.

It is the first time it is intentional.


	2. Chapter 2

**STEP ONE**_  
_

_What have I become, my sweetest friend?_

* * *

Toys were hard to come by in the ghetto. One had to barter, smuggle, lie and plead with the Germans – who were for the most part all too eager to fill their own pockets and empty yours – to get food and clothes and soap, let alone anything extraneous such as a plaything for a child. They made do in other ways. Mothers would make little dolls out of wood splinters and dishrags – dishes being less and less common as time went on – and fathers would carve little figures out of broken furniture, while children fought in the streets over tin cans to kick to arbitrary goalposts.

Erik had been one of them.

So when his father had returned to their tiny apartment _(he'd miss it when they're moved a year later)_ on a day just like any other, a secretive smile on his face, Erik, who'd been busy carving his family's initials into the floorboards with a rusty nail _(even then he'd known the importance of names)_, hadn't expected anything more than a potato.

But the familiar heavy footsteps had stopped next to him, and finding a large shadow suddenly encumbering his meticulous work, Erik had raised his head in askance.

His father had looked so proud as he sat on the floor next to his son. "Come see what I brought you," he'd said.

Curious, Erik had scooted closer on hands and knees and looked critically at the flat checkered box in his father's lap for a long, anticlimactic moment. When nothing occurred, the boy frowned back up at the older man's face.

"It's a box," he'd said blankly.

His father had laughed quietly. "It is far more than a box, Erik."

His forehead wrinkled, he again peered at the box, but the second glance yielded no more than the first. It was a shiny thing, prettier than most of what they owned, which was strange since Father had usually been the first to reprimand Mother for missing the nice things they had to sell when they came to the ghetto. _Be thankful we're all here and together, meine leibe,_ he'd say, and Mother for her part would smile and say _I am, I am _but she'd look at Erik and his little sisters in their threadbare secondhand clothes and cry a little as she said it.

Erik had learned every lesson his father ever taught him, and all of them agreed: there was no point to a pretty box.

"…Is there a gun inside?" he'd said at last, confused.

His father's smile had faltered for a heartbeat, and when it returned it seemed different somehow, twisted in a way that for some reason reminded Erik of Mother saying _I am, I am_. "No - _no_," he'd said strangely, handing Erik the box. After a moment, he cleared his throat. "It's a… it's a game. For us to play."

Erik hadn't really been sure how a box could be much of a game, but he took it from his father's hands, raised it to his ear and listened to the way something inside rattled when he shook it. His eyes widened; he opened the tiny latch on the side hurriedly, excitedly, and suddenly his father was smiling just the way Erik had always thought he should smile, even though Erik hadn't given him anything in return.

The box opened silently. He stared in wonder.

There were miniature figurines inside, black pieces and white, castles and horses and crowns elegantly carved and carefully worn. They were nothing like Erik had ever seen – they were the _richest_ thing Erik had ever seen – and they seemed to almost glow faintly in the gray light coming in from the window.

His voice dropped to an amazed whisper. "What is it, Papa?"

The rare, rare smile grew.

"Chess, Erik," Father said, eyes bright and alive. "This is chess."

00000

A game of kings and men, his father called it. Which sounds odd, in retrospect, since as Jews they had been the farthest thing there was from both. But it had been a secret, a real, special secret, of which there were many in the ghetto but none between Erik and his father, that is until then; and Erik had never looked forward to anything more than to the times his sisters were asleep and his mother wrapped around them both, when he and his father would pry out the box from underneath a loose floorboard, sit by the window and play under the scant light of the moon, because candles were nigh impossible to come by.

Erik had loved those times. So had his father.

But when Ruth and Esther were dragged away, blue eyes huge and scared in their small pale faces, Erik remembers thinking his father looked as though he wished he had gotten a gun instead after all.

The soldiers must have thought the same, because they didn't even hesitate before shooting him in the head.

...And when Erik's little sisters screamed, they shot them too.

00000

_(Erik hadn't screamed. But he wishes, sometimes)_

* * *

The first time he met Charles Xavier, the other man had come to know him in a matter of seconds more thoroughly than anyone Erik had known since the age of twelve. Erik hadn't bothered to dwell on the experience overmuch since – the mere concept of his privacy being invaded so grossly was enough to grit his teeth and stiffen his hands as if on their own; it was something that couldn't be helped, now, after all.

And really, if it had to be anyone seeing into Erik's most private memories, it might as well be Charles. The man was so idealistic and naïve he'd probably repressed most of them. Besides, having the knowledge and knowing what it meant truly were two very different things, as Erik knew fully well.

It came in handy sometimes, too. Not that he would ever bother to acknowledge them, but there were, perhaps, advantages, to someone knowing when to push and when to back off, someone spotting when a conversation hits a sour note, someone realizing in time just when Alex and Sean needed to get the hell away from anything with a metallic sheen to it if they valued their skins.

Some people might say that it is more or less an invitation for manipulation. Erik, being more pragmatic, knows that it makes them a better team. And really, however hard Charles might try, Erik will only allow himself to be manipulated if he feels so inclined, curious enough to see where it might lead.

...Which, admittedly, occurs more often than he'd expect, around Charles.

Erik has yet to decide what this means.

00000

There is such a thing as too much, however, and when after two months of knowing Charles he opens his door and sees the man waiting for him with a chess set, Erik's first reaction is fury.

_(The second, just as painful but far less easy to accept, is betrayal)_

"Explain yourself," he says softly.

Charles' gaze is wide and earnest and Erik hates it. "What's there to explain," he says, with a laugh that he never learned to keep to himself. He waves the lacquered box in his hand – Erik's gaze follows it unwillingly, cataloguing every missing chip and every absent crack that keeps it from perfection _(it is far more than a box, Erik)_. "I thought we might play."

"Play," he repeats, and feels his nostrils flare. He wants to pull the steel framework from the walls, say _how dare you how dare you I thought I could trust you_ but instead he says calmly, damming the anger and hatred and pain roiling in his gut, "I haven't played in over twenty years."

"So it really is about time, isn't it?" Charles says, and makes as if to enter.

Erik blocks his progress with a measured step. There's no one else in the hallway – not that it would have mattered much to him if there were. "I suppose I should have known," he says offhandedly. "Temptation too much to resist, was it?"

The man has the nerve to frown like he has no idea what Erik's talking about. "Sorry?"

"Don't act the fool, Charles," he snarls. "It doesn't suit you."

Charles furrows his brows. "Is there something wrong?"

"You looked, didn't you, you know I haven't – " he can't quite focus on Charles' face, gazing quizzically back at him. "Is that what this is to you? A game? Is that what I am to you?"

"Erik –"

"I am not your _pet_, Charles -" he cuts himself off, chest heaving as he tries to regain control. The sewage pipes tremble, the metal skeleton of the building hums at his ears; he forces himself to let them go.

His stomach clenches unpleasantly at the realization that he's overplayed his hand. _He doesn't even need powers to read you_, he thinks to himself bitterly.

Blue eyes blink at him.

"But of course not, Erik," Charles says simply_. _"You are my friend."

It is too easy, it is far too easy. Erik loses hold of his anger and metal piping in his surprise, and Charles smiles gently back at him, eyes crinkling as if he has only been stating the obvious.

And what if it _is_? What if it _is _obvious, had always been?

How is it that Erik never realized?

"I thought you would enjoy the strategic thinking involved, but perhaps I was mistaken," Charles says quietly. Absurdly, he seems tentative, bracing for hurt. "Would another game suit you better?"

Erik stares at Charles for a long moment, and sees nothing of guile.

...Just a boy, then. Just a boy, hoping to play.

_(A game of kings and men, his father called it, but perhaps it is also Erik's and Charles')_

"No," he croaks, and drops his eyes. "It - it's fine."

"Then if that is the case," Charles says suddenly, "I will ask you again. Would you care for a game of chess?"

And only Charles would extend his hand like that, and not expect anything more in return.

Erik swallows, then clears the doorway wordlessly.

"This is going to be truly marvelous, Erik," his friend says, stepping fearlessly inside Erik's room. "I have a feeling this will be the first of many such games."

He sits and opens the box on the table, arranging the pieces in a pattern Erik finds achingly familiar.

Charles looks up at him, eyebrow raised. "Well then. Ready, my friend?"

Erik sits across from him slowly. His hand reaches across the board almost automatically, and picks up a black king.

He looks at it for a long, long moment. He sets it down.

"Yes," he says.


End file.
